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Sexist Romance Novels: Dark Prince Part 2

Now that Christine Feehan has established what dysfunctional, evil, pathetic people her two main characters are, she must waste no time in establishing justification. How can Raven want to stay with a man who telepathically raped her and still be a strong, selfless, sympathetic character? How can Mikhail torment humans and rape women just because he can and still be someone that the audience should feel so utterly, desperately sorry for? The answer is simple, deeply manipulative, and outright ingenious.

Loneliness.

I won’t launch into a speech that everyone out there has already heard a bazillion times before. Humans aren’t meant to be alone, we’re social creatures, yadda, yadda, yadda. I’ll only say that yes, loneliness can be incredibly hellish and it’s something that’s greatly looked down upon. In modern society, lonely people are meant to be pitied, and I mean really pitied. Pitied enough so that even the most heinous of actions can be condoned if they are committed by a lonely person. Columbine gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were portrayed by the media as social misfits who did what they did because they were bullied and lonely (I’lll explain in a future post how this could not be further from the truth). Thanks to this blatant lie, the killers were shown a great deal of compassion and pity from the public. Matt Stone, co-creator of South Park even said that if they hadn’t been so bullied and alone, maybe they wouldn’t have done what they did.

Loneliness is the Golden Cross of Purity Christine Feehan holds up whenever she needs her readers to condone her character’s dysfunctional behavior. Carpathian males lose the ability to feel emotion after a couple of hundred years (though this is complete bullshit since Mikhail telepathically belched out his grief in the beginning of the book), and live bleak, lifeless, lonely existences until they come across the sex slave lifemate meant for them. They spend hundreds of years not be able to form emotional bonds to other people, who would want to be around a lifeless robot, it’s not their fault, it’s the way that they are, they can’t help it, we should feel so so sosososososososo sorrySORRYSORRY for them!

The same thing goes for Feehan’s heroines. In Raven’s case: she uses her telepathic powers to hunt down serial killers, those powers cause her great pain, they set her apart from other people, she can’t be around other minds without going crazy, everyone sees her as a freak, she so lonely, so isolated, we should feel so so sosososososososo sorrySORRYSORRY for her!

You get the idea.

Christine Feehan is far from the only author to get away with this by holding up the Golden Cross of Purity, but that doesn’t make its light any less blinding. In fact, it’s the reason I was fooled for so long into believing these books were good.

Getting back to the story, Raven decides that it’s not safe for her to be around Mikhail ( no shit, Sherlock) and decides to go back home to the United States. Mikhail is greatly amused by her terror of him and taunts her about it.

“No way. I won’t meet with you.”

“You are afraid. It was a clear taunt.”

After expressing his sadistic pleasure, he then uses his telepathic abilities to try to force her to tell him her name. For committing the grave sin of trying to take away her free will over something so simple, something she even said she would have told him had he simply asked, she deems him “a spoiled child wanting your own way.”

Not a megalomaniac, sadistic psychopath. A spoiled child.

The chapter ends with Mikihail attempting to kill a young man named Jacob for putting his hand on Raven’s knee and asking her out. The physical contact causes the woman he loves great psychic pain. The fact that Jacob didn’t know he was causing her pain “did not absolve his sin” and Mikhail “sees no reason for his existence.” For committing an honest to God accident. How can Raven condone such monstrous behavior?

“Raven was silent, trying to work out a puzzle. She knew evil, had chased it, soaked in it, the obscene, depraved mind of a serial killer. This man spoke casually of killing, yet she did not sense evil from him.”

Apparently Feehan is now setting up Raven’s telepathic powers as God. They are completely infallible. If Mikhail decides a young man deserves to die for wanting to go out with the woman he loves and accidentally causing her pain, then it’s okay so long as telepathy Says So.